Alison Rowland

Check Your Version of NodeJS If You Get This Error

I am sharing a head-desk moment that I had yesterday, in hopes that it could help somebody. The CSS on this new blog of mine wasn’t updating after changing the Less files. This blog runs on Jekyll with the Minimal Mistakes theme, and I hadn’t yet tried to tweak the CSS (as evidenced by the many rough edges around this place). Turns out, I needed to run Grunt to update the CSS, so I installed Grunt, installed the rest of the project’s package dependencies from ‘packages.json’, and hoped for the best: that grunt would start recompiling my CSS.

Oops. Long story short, if you get this error out of a Node app, check your versions on everything. I checked npm (1.3.8). Good. I checked grunt (0.4). Good. Then I checked node.js. 0.6.12. Ancient. That’s what I get for relying on Linux Mint 13’s outdated packages for Node. Installing the latest binaries (0.10.20) fixed it right up.

And that’s why you should always check your package versions!

This was particularly a head-desk moment because I had discovered earlier in the day that I was still running an older and buggy version of ack.